It is rather tempting for philosophers, and I know this from experience, to reduce the topic of “Public Political Philosophy” to a “what” question and a “how” question. Or, if you prefer, to a question of definition and a question of method. Here, by contrast, I focus on the “who” of it. Who are you to be doing it, and, more importantly, who are you going to be doing it with? This matters because, when trying to do anything along these lines, the one thing I know for sure is that you will not be doing it alone.

Inspired by teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote 12 stories about children in an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift. Around 1900, she drafted a table of contents for the collection, The Annals of ‘Steenth Street. The collection was never published as such, but some of these stories were published individually in multiple periodicals over several decades. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories center on the neighborhood’s children and their perspectives. This was literature intended, at least in part, for a child audience. Both the content and the publication history of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories raise important points for scholars of African American children’s literature. Our discussion focuses on the story Dunbar-Nelson intended to appear first in her collection, “The Revenge of James Brown,” published in the Chicago Daily News in 1899 and in the Methodist Episcopal Church School Publications’ weekly paper, the Classmate, in 1930. This story extends notions of where we might look for children’s literature of the Harlem Renaissance to include print venues not often examined with Black children in mind. Moreover, Dunbar-Nelson’s revisions of this story allow for complex considerations of her representations of Black childhood. This essay’s authors are co-founders of the Black digital humanities project, Taught by Literature, the work of which includes creating a freely available digital edition of “The Revenge of James Brown” and Dunbar-Nelson’s other ’Steenth Street stories, working with K-12 educators to create materials to facilitate teaching these stories to children in the present.

This introduction to the Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice: Regrowth, Recycling, Resistance and Repair issue of Public Humanities draws on fieldwork undertaken in the gardens of the Seychelles and Guadeloupe in 2024 and 2025, as well as on Edouard Glissant’s definition of the “jardin creole” as resistance to unitary and hegemonic attitudes toward identity, culture, and belonging. Such gardens have been recognized as a long-standing feature of Creole societies past and present. As a legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, they continue to be mobilized to promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. We present the creole garden around four key words—“regrowth,” “recycling,” “resistance,” and “repair”—that have emerged through our fieldwork observations, testimonies from horticultural activists, scholarship and theory on plots and gardens of the Creole world, as well as the recent proliferation of cultural and artistic interventions on gardens that contributors to this issue chronicle and analyze. Our work demonstrates that botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture can be tools of resistance that self-empower marginalized peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage by generating, from displacements and uprooting, new cultures and new solidarities. Indeed, in the garden, the body interacts with the collective and with the land to provide dignity, pleasure, and healing; and the garden itself is as an “archive-repertoire” of the connected Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which activates hidden pasts and futures that our issue explores.

Originalism, the notion that judges should interpret the Constitution according to the meaning it had at the time it was ratified, is usually associated with expanding executive power. I suggest, however, that the opposite is true: originalism means limiting executive power. If we interpret the Constitution as understood at the time it was created, the question is: What was in the collective mind of the Colonists when they wrote and ratified the Constitution? To answer that question, I return to “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America”—Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers: with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles. In this sermon, read as John Adams says, “by everybody,” Mayhew, thoroughly schooled in Republican thought and English constitutionalism, proposed that “unlimited submission” does not exist, and that the monarch’s powers are always limited. I conclude by drawing parallels between Mayhew’s descriptions of Charles I’s crimes and President Donald Trump’s actions since his second election.

Arguably, recent and prospective developments within artificial intelligence are a fascination within contemporary technoculture. The dawning of a new era that is characterised by the various impacts of these technological and scientific advances leads to questions about the type of subject that will inherit and inhabit the consequences of these developments. This paper will examine the role that speculative fiction plays as a site of critical engagement in investigating some of the more urgent questions posed by the intersection between humans and technology, such as the social consequences of projected technologies and the possibilities of changing embodiment, and particularly how these issues prove to be of immense importance for the gendered subject. The essays contained within Jeanette Winderson’s non-fictional publication 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021) provide a perceptive insight into both the promises and the pitfalls of AI technology for the future female and embodied experience. Winterson’s thought-provoking contemplations will be read alongside her fictional novels, The Stone Gods (2007) and Frankissstein (2019), to consider how she utilises the genre of speculative fiction to explore existing representations of gender whilst working to define new transhuman subjects. A recurring theme throughout these novels is the way in which AI, despite its liberating and transcendent potential, is imagined as the inevitable perpetuation of female subjugation.

The Victorians were devoted to spectacles, from large-scale dioramas to the more modest magic lantern shows which became the staple of the popular lecture circuit. Taking advantage of developments in a whole range of new optical technologies, they offered their audiences both education and entertainment.1 Playing with illusion and a sense of wonder, they broke down the barriers between stillness and life, absence and presence, opening up new vistas for imaginative participation. This roundtable brings together award-winning creative practitioners who continue in this tradition, working in diverse ways with the latest developments in optical technologies, while also using their respective forms of expertise to explore the legacies of Victorian science and culture, reanimating the past for contemporary audiences. All three articles show how humanities projects can draw on artistic forms to enhance research and to widen public participation.

Handling and making objects can make an important contribution to learning, bringing sensory dimensions to understanding technology, style, and functions of objects; thus I use object-based learning as building blocks in my teaching of university students. In the context of the recent pandemic, I had dual concerns about the absence of physical engagement with objects and their materiality (during the long period classes pivoted online) and about the individual and collective well-being of our students, so I designed a new activity to address this in the context of an archaeology module on Minoan Crete. I asked each student to make their own votive offering, photograph/catalogue it, and place it in an experiential/experimental space by writing a prayer or other piece of creative writing about it. In this paper, I describe and reflect on the activity, using three years of collected data, together with student reflections made at the time of making the votive, plus additional interviews conducted later.

Our article aims to show how right-wing women in positions of power like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are able to manipulate feminism to their political advantage. Stemming from our previous study on Meloni’s particular brand of conservative feminism, we analyze the disorienting ability of the right to appropriate and manipulate the traditional language of the left. We are interested in this creation of confusion through rhetorical somersaults on the Italian political stage, specifically how the right appropriates feminist language and themes to further neoliberal economics, neoconservative morals, and a nationalist agenda that is hostile to women, nonwhite people, migrants, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a case study, we offer an analysis of the ideas of one of Italy’s most prominent gender-critical feminists, Marina Terragni, who challenges assumptions about feminism’s ties to the left. Promoting a strictly binary vision, Terragni highlights the fault lines in the relationship between traditional and progressive feminism.

Anatomy has always been a complex subject to teach and learn. Historically, anatomy has been taught via cadaveric dissection, a modality that has declined in recent years due to a shortage of body donations and a pedagogical shift in using virtual reality and technological tools. Today, the teaching of anatomy in medical schools worldwide incorporates the medical humanities. While theoretical knowledge of anatomy is certainly necessary in the healthcare setting, recentering the focus of healthcare from mechanistic models of the body to its transposed context in literary forms such as poetry offer an alternative way of viewing the body, from a mechanistic model to a holistic one that unites the body’s biology with a patient’s selfhood. Through an analysis of two ekphrastic poems about Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’s famous anatomy lessons by contemporary American poet Linda Bierds, I argue that the body (cadaver) that has been deconstructed through anatomical dissection can be reconstructed in poetry via a “poetic dissection.” As a case study, Bierds’s poems demonstrate how the sensory experience of anatomical dissection can reframe dissection as a poetic tool, enhancing the ways in which anatomy, and by extension medical humanities, are taught in medical schools.

Robert Frost’s Readers: The Racial Road Not Taken seeks to make “good trouble” by reading our country’s most cherished poem to challenge our country’s most potent shibboleth. “The Road Not Taken” is America’s iconic and most misunderstood poem, and I argue its reception speaks volumes about the current backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement that has resulted in efforts to scrub our troubled racial past from our museums, schools, and public places. I argue that for over a century readers have failed Frost’s chief challenge, which has been to encourage us to think about the speaker’s “nonconformism,” and our own. We have failed because since 1915, the year the poem appeared, most readers have seen fit to define their cherished nonconformism by ignoring the racial segregation and discrimination that has long befouled the nation and continues to plague us. This article chronicles the many historical events since the early twentieth century that might have encouraged readers to connect their free thinking with considerations of race in America, but did not. Instead, generations of scholars, readers, and advertisers have been mum about the poem’s relevance to matters racial.

“What is Africa to me?” asks Countee Cullen in his famous poem, “Heritage,” which first appeared in 1925 in the special issue of Survey Graphic: “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”; the question haunts not only this magazine issue but also the anthology it inspired, Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), and it is a question which Black American authors have wrestled with ever since. Cullen’s poem has been widely studied, but not much work has been done on its placement in this special issue of Survey Graphic, especially considering the fact that it directly follows Alain Locke’s article, “The Art of the Ancestors.” Clearly, there is a dialogue going on between the authors featured in this magazine about African art, African American art, and the transnational relationship between the two. In this article, I do re-readings of “Heritage” both as it appeared in Color, Cullen’s first book of verse, and also as it appeared in this special issue of Survey Graphic. Ultimately, I argue that “Heritage” has to be understood as a collaborative poem, especially in its original incarnation, and it is a poem that in its various versions is also in argument with itself.

Not only do politics and society struggle to make sense of current and future existential challenges, but science, especially in inter- and transdisciplinary endeavours, tackles the multifarious and often inextricably linked emergencies of our time. This contribution explores the intersection of cutting-edge microbiome science and literary works of art and its vital role in Public Humanities agendas. By the example of Adam Dickinson’s unique poetry collection Anatomic (2018), the paper demonstrates how the emerging, rapidly growing, and paradigm-shifting knowledge of the microbiome is a symbol for the porousness of science and literature, which not only fuels scientific and aesthetic innovation by enabling manifold exchanges beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries but also points towards its specific precariousness. As not only the borders of science and literature become porous as a prerequisite and result of circulatory processes of collaborative knowledge production but also the borders of (human) bodies as the sites of this knowledge-making do, there seems to be nothing less to negotiate than what it means to be human per se pointing towards modes of being human yet to be imagined by science and literature, within and beyond Academia alike.

The rapid expansion of digital media has enabled scholars to engage public audiences through blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and videos, producing a growing body of public humanities content. While this democratization of knowledge has lowered barriers between academic expertise and the public sphere, it has also generated a structural discovery problem. Public-facing scholarship is highly fragmented across platforms and frequently obscured by the overwhelming volume of general online content (a classic “signal versus noise” dilemma). Existing discovery tools are ill-suited to address this gap: traditional academic databases prioritize peer-reviewed literature, while commercial search engines privilege popularity and engagement over scholarly relevance. This article discusses publicscholarship.org, a search index launched in January 2026 to aggregate, categorize, and make discoverable public-facing scholarly content produced by credentialed experts for non-specialist audiences. I outline the conceptual framework for defining public humanities content, the operational criteria used to identify scholars and relevant content, and the balance between automation and human curation that enables scalability.

We usually think of aesthetic experiences as belonging to our engagement with artistic products such as paintings, sculptures, literature, and music, or nature itself. But science can be a source of a wide range of aesthetic experiences, and scientific pursuits in their turn can be shaped by aesthetic judgements. In this piece, I explore how scientific experimentation, through the choice of design, production of results, performance, and creative agency, is both shaped by aesthetic judgements and a source of a broad range of aesthetic experiences. The piece reflects why the aesthetic dimension of scientific practice matters in the production of knowledge.

This article examines far-right nature by showing how contemporary movements weave ecological and public-health discourses into forms of political storytelling with broad public appeal. Focusing on cases from Europe and the United States, it traces how Rassemblement National’s eco-populism, the agrarian ultranationalism of Călin Georgescu, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” coalition channels public concern over climate and health crises into exclusionary narratives. The rhetoric of far-right nature can be difficult to identify and critique, in part because its ostensible concern with well-being and the environment often distances it from culturally dominant images of classical fascism. Nevertheless, the article demonstrates resonances between contemporary far-right nature and the biopolitical and organicist imaginaries of interwar fascist movements. Combining approaches from the environmental humanities with scholarship on fascism and the far right, the article argues that a public-facing environmental humanities must attend not only to imagination and storytelling but also to the political work environmental narratives perform within reactionary and exclusionary projects.

The Projection Studio (https://theprojectionstudio.com/) has been creating public art with sound and projection for over thirty years. During this time, we have built a body of work which uses video projection mapping and audio as a tool for public engagement. Using large-scale public art for public engagement can give results that other types of engagement cannot. It can draw large audiences, new audiences, and give researchers and academics the opportunity to meet people who would not normally engage with the subject matter. In this article, we reflect on how that process can work, using as an example the award-winning projection and sound piece “Victorian Speed of Life.” This was created for the European Research Council funded project “Diseases of Modern Life” (https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/home). We will also look at its impact on both researchers and the public audience.

This article explores the paradoxical phenomenon of far-right “philosemitism,” in which political movements historically steeped in antisemitism present themselves as defenders of Jews and allies of Israel. Drawing on contemporary examples—such as the French National Rally’s claim to be a “shield for Jews,” and the American evangelical alliances with Israel—the study situates these gestures within a longer trajectory of far-right ambivalence toward Jews. While often dismissed by pundits and scholars as simply opportunistic weaponization of antisemitism, these pro-Jewish stances also reveal deeper discursive and ideological functions: self-legitimation, moral licensing, and the repositioning of Jews as symbolic allies against other outgroups. This article identifies such ambivalence in early 20th-century European thought, highlighting case studies from the German Empire where figures such as Börries von Münchhausen, Wilhelm Schwaner, and Max Hildebert Boehm articulated versions of philosemitism that combined admiration with exclusionary imperatives. Across contexts, a recurring logic emerges: a dualistic “Good Jew/Bad Jew” distinction, whereby “authentic” Jews—biblical, assimilated, or nationalist—are praised, while “inauthentic” Jews—cosmopolitan, liberal, or diasporic—are condemned. By historicizing far-right “philosemitism,” its function, and significance, this article is an attempt to combat its harmful normalizing effects.

The Vietnam National Action Plan (NAP) for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) mitigation is a guiding document in the fight against AMR, which outlines policies to slow down the AMR progression and reduce its impact. However, progress in NAP implementation has been uneven. This study implemented 10-stakeholder consultations to explore the NAP implementation through the Just Transition lens with particular focus on tensions, trade-offs, inequalities, and unintended consequences that may inhibit progress. There were 89 participants representing healthcare staff, community members, farmers, drug suppliers, meat handlers, and government agencies responsible for environmental management, sanitation, and hygiene. We used the Just Transition framework to explore perspectives and experiences of NAP implementation in Ha Noi and Nam Dinh province, Vietnam. We found limited contributions of stakeholders to NAP activities and low awareness about its impact. They lacked dedicated resources to implement NAP activities and an effective collaboration mechanism across sectors. Cross-sectoral collaboration has the potential to improve efficiency but may also introduce conflict among stakeholders. Just Transition framing highlights how greater involvement in decision-making and planning could increase visibility, buy-in, and motivation for action among different stakeholders, while making tensions explicit could help with balancing competing interests and ensuring fair distribution of limited resources.

The ancient Greek author Thucydides is widely cited in discussions of international affairs and contemporary politics, such as the Russian-Ukraine War and relationships between the United States and China. However, he is often presented in such debates as a purveyor of universal theories or inspirational slogans. His reputation as an authoritative thinker, founded in the complexity and originality of his account of the past, is used to legitimise simplistic claims about the present. This article surveys three common examples of such readings—the Melian Dialogue and its relation to Realism, the Thucydides Trap, and the plague at Athens—to consider how they may offer a misleading idea of Thucydides’ work and what it could actually tell us about politics today.